It was more like a dentist’s waiting room than an art gallery, Lorna thought, and the excitement began to seep out of her. This definitely wasn’t how she remembered the Maiden Gallery. It no longer smelled of figs and paint and birthdays. It no longer had surprises wherever you looked, or paintings that stuck in your imagination. It didn’t even have a black cat stalking around. All galleries needed a black cat.
But she didn’t have to sell sheep’s heads, she reminded herself. The sheep could be replaced with something better. Something fresh and new and as yet undiscovered.
Lorna pulled herself together and extended a hand. ‘I’m not actually here for the exhibition, I’m here to view the gallery,’ she said. ‘I’m Lorna Larkham. Are you Mary? The agents suggested you could show me around.’
The lady put her pen down and a smile lit up her face as she pushed the glasses further up her nose. ‘Ah ha! I’m Mary Knowles – lovely to meet you! Welcome to the Maiden! Everything is Maid-en Longhampton … Do you see?’
‘Oh!’ Lorna had genuinely never worked that out. ‘Oh … right.’
They shook hands and as her gaze roamed further around, Lorna felt bad for dismissing the art on display. It wasn’t all terrible. Just a bit meh . Beyond the initial room of sheep, she could see glass cabinets with handmade jewellery ranging from clunky to Supply Art Teacher, and items carved from wood.
‘Do you want to look at the gallery or the flat first?’ Mary enquired. ‘The gallery is quite self-explanatory, I suppose, with the two front rooms, and then we go back a little way …’ She stood up and showed Lorna through to the second room, which was much like the first but with a wall of tiny paintings of sheep in enormous felted frames, and more spinners with birthday cards. The floors were nice, though – thick oak planks that hadn’t been painted white. Yet.
‘This is our ceramics room,’ Mary went on. ‘We usually put Jim Timson’s pottery in here but he’s got a bad back and can’t face the kiln until he’s seen the specialist. So we’re selling what’s left from Penny Wright’s last collection.’
Lorna peered round the corner into the back room. This at least was more like her memories: the pottery had always been in here, goblets with curling greenery like Viking celebration vessels, and enormous bowls that were only good for pot pourri. Now, there were two tables filled with wonky cheese plates. The ceiling sloped where some stairs ran above, and there was a boarded-up fireplace festooned with icicles made out of coloured resin.
Mary clapped a hand to her chest. ‘Oh, sorry, they’re left over from Christmas. I should have moved those by now. I’ve been rushed off my feet …’
Lorna privately doubted that, but she asked anyway. ‘Were you very busy over Christmas?’
‘Well, not so much, but I’m here on my own and I’m supposed to be running down the stock. My husband retired, and insisted that I gave up the gallery so we could both have some time off, and I said yes, so Keith went ahead and booked a whole series of golfing breaks, and then Jackie who used to pop in a few days a week got another job because I gave her notice, so I was on my own, which wouldn’t have been a problem if we’d managed to move on, but I said I’d keep the place open until the agents found a new tenant, you see. And since then we haven’t had any interest, which is disappointing, and …’
‘Do you want to show me upstairs?’ asked Lorna.
The stairs up to the flat were at the back of the gallery, past some shelves of mixed media collages that looked as if someone had emptied a Hoover bag on a glue-covered canvas, an office, and a pile of boxes marked ‘Terry’s Dream Unicorns – returns’. Although the carpet was threadbare, Lorna could make out thick wooden treads beneath them, and some of the tickling excitement began to return.
‘Up we go!’ Mary eyed the steep staircase with little enthusiasm, then began hauling herself upwards.
‘You never fancied living here yourselves?’ Lorna asked, giving Mary a discreet head start.
‘Not really. We live out in Hartley, where we could have a bit of a garden. We could have taken in lodgers, I suppose, but Keith had a bad experience with a buy-to-let … Of course it’s handy for storage.’ Mary reached the top and got her breath back. ‘Sorry it’s so cold. I should have thought to put the heating on.’
She unlocked the front door and stepped back, so Lorna could see into the flat properly. ‘This is it …’
‘Wow,’ said Lorna, because she couldn’t help herself.
The dark narrowness of the stairs opened up into an unexpectedly large landing, light and airy, and echoing with lack of furniture. Ahead of them was the kitchen, with three long sash windows looking on to the main street, and a heavy pine table that had obviously been too much hassle to move out once it was there. Lorna’s eye was drawn immediately across the kitchen to the perky red geraniums in the windowboxes of the house opposite; the kitchen was at double-decker-bus level, high enough to notice the furbelows and moulded garlands on the upper-storey façades.
‘And that’s a storage room, as you can see, but it’s a sitting room really.’ A smaller room to the left was stacked with canvases and brown boxes, with a worn-out sofa opposite a fireplace. The stairs continued to wind round behind them, up to the second floor, and higher.
I wouldn’t have enough furniture to fill this place, thought Lorna, and the idea thrilled her. So much space! An empty room, just for art and thinking and yoga. It would be amazing .
‘I always forget how big it is. Two storeys and an attic. Excuse this mess.’ Mary’s boots were loud on the floorboards as she darted into the storeroom to tidy the stacks of paintings. They weren’t messy, Lorna thought, quite the opposite. The rooms were full of inspiration, people’s dreams and imagination. ‘These shouldn’t be here. We were supposed to have returned these to Donald. Trouble is, these artists, they look so hurt when things don’t sell … Four bedrooms, two baths. Though I can’t say what the bathrooms are like. We used one of them to store ice for the last proper private view …’
Lorna turned round slowly, taking everything in. She’d always had to share: first a childhood bedroom with snoring, fussy, constantly revising Jess, then with other friends in a student house, then flatshares, and then when she’d finally been able to afford a place of her own, it was so tiny that she could only have one friend round at a time. This was the lavish, airy space she’d craved for years – space to put up shelves for her ceramics, and set her clothes out on rails like a designer boutique, space to be alone, to hang everything she’d collected up on the walls. Space to let her own self spread out.
And it was cheaper than her current rent. So much cheaper it made her want to laugh.
‘Have you run a gallery before?’ Mary was speaking, and Lorna turned round. The friendly smile suggested she wasn’t asking in an interviewing way, more out of conversation.
Even so, Lorna felt herself hedging around the question. ‘No, not really. Well, I’ve, um, dabbled.’
That was a terrible answer. But she didn’t want to go into all that now, and anyway, it was in the past. The pop-up in Shoreditch had never seemed further away than it did now.
But at the same time, Lorna could feel the strange tingle of belief again. And this time she didn’t need anyone’s second opinion.
Betty’s funeral took place in a sombre crematorium miles from the hospice and even further from the colourful scenes of her long and dramatic life.
It was a quiet service. The only other attendees apart from Lorna were a couple of old ladies from the hospice, and three nurses. Debra had come in on her day off, to pay her respects to the smart woman who’d taught her daughter how to beehive her hair for prom – and, when Debra wasn’t listening, told her how to stop a boy’s hands from wandering. There were none of Betty’s family there at all.
It came as a shock to Lorna, after her conversation with Betty about Christmas, to discover that Betty’s children had predeceased her, many years earlier. Naughty little Susie, who loved trifle ‘apart from the sherry’,
had been killed twenty years ago, in a car accident; clever Peter the accountant had had a stroke; Debra wasn’t sure what had happened to Rae, other than that she’d never been on the hospice’s radar.
‘It’s sad,’ she whispered to Lorna as the coffin disappeared behind the curtain for the last time and the sound of Glenn Miller indicated discreetly that they could leave. ‘Doesn’t matter how popular you are, once you get over ninety, most funerals are like this – your mates are waiting for you on the other side, not here. Good on you for coming, though. Betty really appreciated your visits.’
Lorna had managed a weak smile. Getting a bus to Streatham and singing a hymn she didn’t know seemed like the least she could do for a woman who’d given her the kick up the bahookie, as Betty would have put it, to phone the estate agent and put her money where her dreams were. The Maiden Gallery was now hers, to transform as best she could, sheep and all.
In the Garden of Remembrance, Lorna laid three red carnations on the memorial, blew a kiss up into the grey south London sky, and promised Betty that from that moment on, she would take a deep breath and do her damnedest to feel her edges, wherever they were. And also to wear lipstick as often as possible.
Before she left, Debra had given Lorna a note from the matron asking her to call in at the hospice next time she was passing, and she went the following morning, on her way to the bank to set up a new business account. Lorna had intended to let the volunteer organisers know about her move to Longhampton in any case – and to ask if there were any similar schemes that they knew of in the area.
At first, the volunteering had been a suggestion by a therapist she’d seen after her father died, as a way of working through her pain about their strained relationship at the end, her anger with herself that she hadn’t been able to unlock his silent grief, the awkward silences filled with ticking clocks. But Lorna soon realised the problem wasn’t talking : she enjoyed spending time with the patients she sat with. They weren’t her dad, they weren’t hosting glum elephants in the room that squashed all conversation flat. Some had great anecdotes; some had mastered companionable silence; whether they chatted or not, they all taught her something, and she would miss it, Lorna thought, as the nurse on duty walked her down to the matron’s office. Probably more than they’d miss her.
Kathryn’s office was a peaceful room with a view on to the special sensory garden, but though it was a drizzly day outside, inside it felt unseasonally floral. On the table by the door was a large vase full of scented tiger lilies but, after a moment or two, Lorna realised that even their pungent fragrance wasn’t masking the even more pungent fragrance of dog, emanating from the wicker dog carrier by her desk. Inside which, she could just see, was Rudy.
The flowers weren’t normally there. She was almost certain they’d been placed there by one of the nurses to minimise Rudy’s presence.
‘Now we’ve finally got Betty’s paperwork sorted out, I can give you this,’ said Kathryn, once Lorna was sitting in the easy chair opposite.
She slid a padded envelope across the desk. As Lorna began to demur, she said, ‘I know there are rules, but Betty insisted she wanted you to have this … and that you’d understand what she meant.’
The envelope felt light, and when Lorna opened it, a thin tissue-wrapped sliver of something dropped into her hands. She unwrapped it carefully: it was a circular silver medal, on a blue-striped red ribbon. ‘Is this Betty’s? What is it?’
‘A George Medal,’ said Kathryn. ‘Apparently, when she was just a slip of a thing, Betty ran into a Lyons Corner House that had been bombed, and dragged out two people seconds before it collapsed. Pretty impressive – they didn’t just hand those medals out to anyone.’
Lorna could picture it: the wailing sirens and the dusty confusion, Betty shouldering her way past the officials to do the right thing. ‘Did she tell you this?’
‘No, we found a newspaper cutting, tucked in the back of an old photo album,’ said Kathryn, shaking her head. ‘I wish she had told us, don’t you? That generation keep the oddest things to themselves. We knew all about Betty’s divorces but she never mentioned her George Medal. Did she say anything to you about her war work?’
‘Just that she’d been in the Blitz.’ Lorna turned the medal over and over. It felt solid, a hard reminder of a fleeting moment, a breath of smoke. ‘Shouldn’t her family have it though?’
‘You were at the funeral. There is no one. Anyway, she left specific instructions – she wanted you to have it. There’s a card in there.’
There was. Lorna opened the envelope and read the note inside: My dear Lorna, Put this in your pocket and remember – feel your edges!! Yours ever, Betty. She’d signed it with a big Hollywood B, even though the writing was wobbly.
‘That’s wonderful.’ She touched the worn ribbon, overcome; Betty hadn’t kept this in a presentation box, she’d probably had it in her pocket too, reminding her to be brave every day, not just when bombs were raining down around her. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
Kathryn tapped the desk with her pen. ‘There’s another thing too.’
Lorna looked up. She hoped it wasn’t the fox fur Betty had kept draped over her chair. ‘I honestly can’t take anything else. That’s not what I volunteered for …’
‘It’s really a favour for us as well as Betty.’ She nodded towards the basket by her feet. ‘Now, I don’t want to put you under any pressure, but we promised Betty we’d find Rudy a new home. I’ve been advised that the waiting time at the RSPCA is into weeks. They’re always busy after Christmas, those poor puppies whose novelty’s worn off. To be honest, Lorna, I’d rather not take him there if I can help it. He’s already giving up.’
Lorna could only just make Rudy out in the darkness of the carrier. He was curled up at the back of it, his head tucked on his paws, turned away from a room that he no longer had any interest in.
‘I’d take him myself,’ Kathryn went on, ‘but my cats barely let my husband in these days, ha ha!’
Lorna smiled but didn’t laugh. She was trying very hard to drag the unreasonable side of her brain into line.
Lorna had never had a pet. She wasn’t sure what you were meant to do with dogs, other than follow them around with a black bag and not, under any circumstances, let them eat Dundee cake. This she’d gleaned from the lady in the room next to Betty’s who’d found out the hard way that dogs who eat fruit cake require expensive medical intervention. Dogs loved you, sure, but they also moulted, demanded attention and forced you to reorganise your life around their bladders. The responsibility wasn’t something she particularly wanted to take on, not if she was about to move house and start up a new business.
More than that, the idea of taking responsibility for another creature’s love bothered Lorna. It was an extension of how she felt about human relationships – they all had to end some time, leaving one party broken with loss. Her parents had had what most people would consider the perfect soulmate relationship, and yet look how it had turned out. Their love had been so all-encompassing that they literally couldn’t live without each other. Dad had vanished without his Cathy. Mum hadn’t had a best friend, other than Dad. Why would you want to start that, if misery was the inevitable end point? Surely it was better to live in a state of sociable independence with the world?
She looked into the basket. Rudy seemed to be pining in a very similar way for Betty. Sleeping in the hope of never waking up to his new, Betty-less life.
‘If you’d like to read this letter she left …’ Kathryn passed her a sheet of A4 covered in rambling handwriting. The agitation showed in the up-and-down lines; it was much less composed than the witty little card. ‘I don’t know if you can make it out, but she’s left money – quite a lot of money, actually – in trust to cover his insurance. We’re not making that public, wouldn’t want someone unscrupulous taking advantage. We’ve all seen Annie , ha ha. But it’s a factor, if you’re thinking you might be able to take him on. He wouldn’t cost you anything.??
?
Lorna was skimming the lines; she heard Betty’s anxious care in every sentence.
… make sure Rudy’s diet is low fat … vet says he’s prone to back problems … careful walking him, as he’s anxious about strangers, and other dogs, and thunder, and cars, and men … likes a small saucer of tea at bedtime, but no sugar because of his teeth!!!
Her eye stopped at: … please ask Lorna if she could help interview a new owner, as Rudy trusts her. He doesn’t trust many people. She will know if they’re kind or not.
She glanced into the basket. Rudy’s black eyes were observing her, alive and glittery with trepidation, and her heart wrenched. She hated to think of him being taken to a noisy rescue kennel, left there to be peered at in a concrete run – and passed over time and again? After the comforts he was used to with Betty?
This is why you don’t want a dog , she reminded herself.
‘How old is he?’ Maybe it wouldn’t be a long-term commitment. Lorna struggled between the voice in her head yelling No , and her desire to be the good person Betty and Kathryn and everyone at the hospice assumed she was.
‘Six.’ Kathryn pushed a folder across the desk. ‘So he should be around for a good while yet. Betty kept him in very good nick – look at these dental records! I’d be happy if some of our patients in here had as many check-ups.’
Lorna eyed the dachshund, who’d turned round to face the room, and was now lying down with his nose on his paws, all the better to gaze up at her. He was sleek and dark chestnut, bigger than she remembered, now he was stretched out. It was amazing that he’d never made those smells while he’d been lying at Betty’s bedside. Or maybe the lavender had been stronger in there.
‘Have a think,’ said Kathryn. ‘One of the nurses says she’ll have him for a few days. But if we can’t get him into the rescue here, I’m not sure what we can do. Poor boy. It’s like he’s lost his spark. I’m not sure if it’s not kinder to …’